The Sciku Project

particles or waves?
moving from a dream state
to awakening…

by John Hawkhead

Fundamental particles such as photons and electrons display the characteristics of particles AND waves depending on the experiments we use to measure them. Particles have momentum and position so we can identify the effect when they interact with other particles. On the other hand, a wave can pass over, around or through physical objects. They are oscillations that transfer energy from one location to another.

So matter can be considered to be waves and particles depending on the method of measurement (see The Copenhagen Interpretation of Bohr and Heisenberg). Other theories have competed for our understanding of how subatomic matter behaves, such as the Many Worlds interpretation, but the duality of the Copenhagen Interpretation is still a strong contender for explaining how the subatomic world works.

Dreams can seem very real, sometimes involving all of our senses. They often involve people we know, sometimes in bizarre events that nevertheless can leave us strongly impacted upon awakening from sleep. Some dreams can be very closely related to current events in one’s life and so seem to take on a significance that we may try to rationalise in relation to our waking lives.

Two great thinkers on this subject, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, both considered dreams as important in understanding the human psyche, whether as repressed desires or as messages from the unconscious that inform our waking lives. So are dreams real? Are they as much a part of our existence as the waking world? Is there a duality of existence in waking and dreaming? Perhaps we go somewhere else when we dream that is just as real as in the conscious world.

Further reading:

‘Elementary particle’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle

‘Copenhagen interpretation’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation

‘Many-worlds interpretation’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

‘Sigmund Freud’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud

‘Carl Jung’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@haikuhawk.bsky.social) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/).

Read more of John’s sciku here!